The English Teacher

The English Teacher by Yiftach Reicher Atir is a spy novel set in Israel, based on Atir's real experience working in Israeli military intelligence. The book follows two main characters, Mossad agent Rachel Goldschmitt and Ehud, her former handler. When Rachel goes missing after her father's funeral, Ehud is sent on a mission to find her. Unfortunately, living under an assumed identity is never simple, and Ehud is forced to grapple with the many ways that Rachel's real and assumed realities wove together after years of living under a fake name.

The novel opens with Rachel Ravid – sometimes known as Rachel Goldschmitt, and Rachel Brooks – as she packs up her deceased father's apartment. She is forty-one-years old, and feels an immense sense of freedom as she closes the last few boxes of her father's items. For the first time, she has the ability to do whatever she wants – and she has no interest in returning to her work as a researcher of biological weapons in Tel Aviv. Instead, Rachel is going to the Middle East. Where, exactly, she won't say.

Perhaps to lure him to find her, and perhaps out of impulse, Rachel makes one phone call before she disappears. She calls her former handler, who’s now a retired agent named Ehud. He answers, and she says, quickly, “My father died. He died for the second time,” before hanging up the phone.



On the other end of the line, widowed Ehud is confused and perplexed. He had feelings for Rachel back when he was her handler, and he knows his colleagues think he let his feelings get in the way of his management of Rachel. When he calls into the intelligence agency, there is panic; Rachel's cover story for fleeing the Middle Eastern country where she worked for six years undercover as an English teacher involved the sudden death of her father. Now, this clue makes agents think Rachel might be going back to that same place, perhaps to find the lover she took while she was living there, whom she abandoned without warning when she felt her real identity was at risk.

Ehud is taken out of retirement to track Rachel, and he immediately doubts that she is as much of a loose cannon as everyone seems to believe. Ehud is also terrified that Rachel's impulsive decision to suddenly leave Mossad with a head full of state secrets will make her a target; he recalls, in vivid detail, painful Mossad assassinations of agents who went rogue.

As Ehud tracks Rachel, he talks about her experiences in Mossad, and reflects on what draws people to work in intelligence, besides the appeal of performing one's patriotic duty. Rachel had to perform her own covert Mossad assassination, on a German scientist, using a poisoned glove. She was also forced, over and over again, to betray her lover Rashid, the Middle Eastern man whom she took as a lover while living undercover. Rashid's parents ran a chemical company, and from his intel Rachel was able to gain extraordinary knowledge on the advancement of the country's biological weapons. But Ehud wonders if she misses that sweet, gentle man who told her everything – and the simpler life she pretended to live, far away from assassinations and dangerous missions.



Ehud's reflections on the adrenaline rush of spy work, and the pleasures that come from being not only encouraged, but required to lie, illuminate some of Atir's own experience as an intelligence agent. Ultimately, the novel examines identity, and what it means to live a double life – blurring the line between which self is most true.

Yiftach Reicher Atir is an Israeli novelist and retired Brigadier General. He was born in Kibbutz Shoval in southern Israel in 1949, and had a long and successful career in military intelligence before his retirement. He participated in missions like Operation Entebbe, a hostage rescue mission which took place in Uganda in the mid-1970s. The English Teacher is his third novel, and his first novel translated into English.